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Experimental surgery performed by AI-driven surgical robot

arstechnica.com

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Re: Experimental surgery performed by AI-driven surgical robot

#111

Post by hansmayer »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #52
copperx wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, if there's overwhelming superiority, why not? But a lot of surgeries are special corner cases. How do you train for those?

Who do you think has seen more corner cases? A) All the DaVinci robots that have ever been used for a particular type of surgery. B) The most experienced surgeon of that specialty.

...Except that a surgeon can reason in real-time even if he wasn´t "trained" on a specific edge-case. Its called intelligence. And unless they have been taking heavy drugs ahead of the procedure, or were sleep deprived, its very un-likely a surgeon will have a hallucination, of the kind that is practically a feature of the GenAI.

Re: Experimental surgery performed by AI-driven surgical robot

#112

Post by ben_w »

ikari_pl wrote: post #66
austinkhale wrote: post #7

If Waymo has taught me anything, it’s that people will eventually accept robotic surgeons. It won’t happen overnight but once the data shows overwhelming superiority, it’ll be adopted.

waymo only needs to operate in a 2D space and care about what's in front and on the sides of it. that's much simpler than three dimensional coordination. an "oops" in a car is not immediately life threatening either

> an "oops" in a car is not immediately life threatening either

They definitely can be. One of the viral videos of a Tesla "oops" in just the last few months showed it going from "fine" to "upside-down in a field" in about 5 seconds.

And I had trouble finding that because of all the other news stories about Teslas crashing.

While I trust Waymo more than Tesla, the problem space is one with rapid fatalities.

Re: Experimental surgery performed by AI-driven surgical robot

#113

Post by ethan_smith »

flowmerchant wrote: post #11

Complications happen in surgery, no matter how good you are. Who takes the blame when a patient has a bile leak or dies from a cholecystectomy? This brings up new legal questions that must be answered.

The FDA released guidance in March 2025 requiring "human-in-the-loop" oversight for all autonomous surgical systems, with mandatory attribution of decision-making responsibility in the surgical record. This creates a shared liability model between the surgeon, manufacturer, and hospital system.

Re: Experimental surgery performed by AI-driven surgical robot

#114

Post by [deleted] »

tremon wrote: post #40

> Indeed, the patient was alive before we started this procedure, but now he appears unresponsive. This suggests something happened between then and now. Let me check my logs to see what went wrong. > Yes, I removed the patient's liver without permission. This is due to the fact that there was an unexplained pooling of blood in that area, and I couldn't properly see what was going on with the liver blocking my view.…

[deleted]

Re: Experimental surgery performed by AI-driven surgical robot

#115

Post by latexr »

hansmayer wrote: post #109

> "To move from operating on pig cadaver samples to live pigs and then, potentially, to humans, robots like SRT-H need training data that is extremely hard to come by. Intuitive Surgical is apparently OK with releasing the video feed data from the DaVinci robots, but the company does not release the kinematics data. And that’s data that Kim says is necessary for training the algorithms. “I know people at Intuitive Su…

> Morals aside, how is this legal?

Things are legal until they are made illegal. When you come up with something new, it understandably hasn’t been considered by the law yet. It’s kind of hard to make things illegal before someone has thought them up.

Re: Experimental surgery performed by AI-driven surgical robot

#116

Post by mnky9800n »

austinkhale wrote: post #7

If Waymo has taught me anything, it’s that people will eventually accept robotic surgeons. It won’t happen overnight but once the data shows overwhelming superiority, it’ll be adopted.

TBH i trust the robot more than some random uber driver who just can't stop talking about their fringe beliefs.

Re: Experimental surgery performed by AI-driven surgical robot

#117

Post by hansmayer »

latexr wrote: post #115
hansmayer wrote: post #109

> "To move from operating on pig cadaver samples to live pigs and then, potentially, to humans, robots like SRT-H need training data that is extremely hard to come by. Intuitive Surgical is apparently OK with releasing the video feed data from the DaVinci robots, but the company does not release the kinematics data. And that’s data that Kim says is necessary for training the algorithms. “I know people at Intuitive Su…

> Morals aside, how is this legal? Things are legal until they are made illegal. When you come up with something new, it understandably hasn’t been considered by the law yet. It’s kind of hard to make things illegal before someone has thought them up.

Really? So medical licenses dont matter any more?

Re: Experimental surgery performed by AI-driven surgical robot

#118

Post by bluefirebrand »

SoftTalker wrote: post #95
bluefirebrand wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not remotely convinced that "transplanting consciousness" is a thing that is even possible At best we may eventually be able to copy a consciousness, but that isn't the same thing

That would make an interesting story plot. Suppose we've developed the ability to copy a consciousness. It has all your memories, all your feelings, your same sense of "self" or identity. If you die, you experience death, but the copy of your consciousness lives on, as a perfect replacement. Would that be immortality?

I have thought about this quite a lot

I don't think it is immortality. It is just cloning

Any theoretical scheme that could let you exist at the same time as a clone of yourself means the clone is clearly not you. It's a different independent individual that only appears to be you

Re: Experimental surgery performed by AI-driven surgical robot

#119

Post by bluefirebrand »

BriggyDwiggs42 wrote: post #96
rscho wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it depends on your definition of 'surgery'. One could well imagine that transplanting your conscience into a new body might well be feasible before we get to live on Mars.

I don’t want to be too confident on something like this, but I feel like consciousness comes somehow from the material body (and surrounding world) in all its complexity, so transplanting consciousness absent transplant of physical material wouldn’t be possible in theory. This assumes it’s a consequence of the structure of things and not something separate, but I think that’s a reasonable guess.

The way I think of it is that consciousness is a side effect that arises from the complex circuitry of our brains

I also don't want to be too confident, I'm not an expert on this. But I don't think consciousness is tied to any one physical component of our brains, it is something that only happens when the whole system is assembled

This is why I don't think you can move consciousness. You can create a new identical brain, but that create a new consciousness. How do you transplant a side effect?

It would be like saying "we can move the heat that this circuit is generating to this other circuit". Clearly you can't really

Re: Experimental surgery performed by AI-driven surgical robot

#120

Post by ashoeafoot »

How does it handle problem cascades ? Like removing necrotic pancreatitis causing bleeding,c auterized bleeding causing internal mini strokes, strokes causing further rearranging emergency surgery to remove dead tissue? Surgery in critical systems is normally cut & dry, but occasionally becomes this avalancg of nightmares and add hoc decisions.
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